Chapter 10
RELEASING THE CONSTRAINTS: 
THE PROCESS OF MANAGEMENT

Unfortunately, the very word "management" has come to signify a constraining process. Our experiences with low-trust management begin early in life. Several years ago I was called in as a professional consultant to be the neutral chairman of a national conference held in Washington, D.C., on competitive sports for children under twelve years of age. It was an enlightening experience. After three days of intense and heated debate and data sharing, there was a final recorded vote on the major motion before the assembly of about 100 representatives of organizations.

The motion was made to recommend that all competitive sports for children under twelve be banned. The representatives of all of the organizations representing children voted for the motion to ban such sports. Organizations represented were the major national parent-teachers group, and psychological, educational, psychiatric, recreational, physical education, children's rights, orthopedic, and other professional groups. Every representative of these groups, without a single exception, voted for the motion to ban the sports because they had been shown to be harmful in many ways to the young children.

Also represented were the major sports equipment manufacturers and the national media that publicize such events. Every single representative of these groups voted against the motion, and it failed—there was a larger representation from the commercial groups than from the professional groups.

The disinterested professionals had presented volumes of clear-cut evidence of damage to young children from such competitive activities, but this carried little weight against the overwhelming fact that they were immensely profitable to the athletic companies and the media. Certainly, the macro-environment is very powerful. We are embedded in a competitive, profit-making system. I will come back to this issue in the following chapter on social change.

The relevance here is that one major area of data dealt with the primitive and harmful management practices of the coaches, committees, parents, media, and other adults who run the athletic programs. Hours of testimony contained illustrations of what I am calling EQ I, II, and III management processes, judged by these professionals to be harmful and toxic for the children. They told of the frequent use of punishment as motivators, whimsical discipline, harmful competitiveness, a win-at-all-cost attitude of coaches, lack of participation by the children in any of the decisions about their activities, exploitation of the children for adult purposes, premature professionalization and depersonalization, and manipulative commercialization by the equipment manufacturing companies.

As the volumes of testimony indicated, these athletic programs are far from being the character-development activities they are reputed to be. Instead, they are often arenas for learning the worst practices of modern management. An example: Rule-making is the norm. Rule circumvention is about equally prevalent. A typical illustration: A well known executive, who was a parent and a league official, announced to a huge, end-of-regular-season group of kids and parents: "As you know, league rules prohibit our having our All Stars practice before June 20, so we are not announcing our All Star selections until that date, when official practice will start. Meantime, we would like to ask the following 24 players to report on June 6 to play for two weeks before the All Star practice." Everyone laughed, knowing that the 24 were the players who would be announced as the All-Star selections on June 20.

Three days of such illustrations left all of the professionals who worked with youth very much convinced that the abuses in the management of organized sports for youngsters were so great as to warrant a recommendation that such organized athletics be discontinued. My impression is that in such organized sports we have groups of well intentioned adults, willing and anxious to serve children, to provide supervised recreation, and to "keep the kids off the streets". Unfortunately, they find themselves caught in tangled webs of bad habits of parenting, traditional and unexamined management practices, distrustbred assumptions about kids and how they learn, and complex institutional practices and rules—all of which are based upon and grow out of our earlier fears and distrusts. Parents, coach-teachers, and league officials don't intend to teach rule-breaking, lying, manipulative strategy, fear, and distrust. But in fact these are the unintentional and inevitable by-products of two highly related factors: distrusting attitudes and inadequate and false theory.

And so it is, often, with teachers, administrators, parents, counselors, ministers, managers, executives. All are caught up in a number of distrust assumptions about managing people. The message in TORI theory for all of us who manage is implicit throughout this book.

Because of the assumed centrality of management practices as determiners of environmental quality, I'd like to focus on the implications of TORI theory for the practice of management. Until groups and organizations learn to live in EQ levels VI and beyond, much of our organized life is going to be spent in environments that are determined by our leaders and our attitudes toward them. Most of you who read this book are in one or more formal "managerial roles" or are trying to prepare for one. We are caught and usually will become even more entangled in the fear/deception/manipulating web. I am going to share, below, my impressions and theory about this problem.

My trust level is my internal regulator and what I do as a manager or parent will be a function of this changing level. Altering trust level is not a simple act of will, an act of rational choice, or a matter of understanding or insight. It is a total spiritmindbody process, a continuous re-birthing, a deeply organic process. Basic trust level is amazingly stable, but it does change and can be changed by the person through autogenic process. I change my trust level by creating an environment for myself that allows me to discover that people and processes can be trusted. Trust, like grace, comes as a gift to the spirit, but one must be prepared for it, open-minded, and willing to receive it. It is apparently a continuingly growing central process. Even Christ, often cited as a model of trusting, apparently lost His faith/trust at a moment of ultimate crisis, and His cry, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?", came when He wavered in His trust of the process.

The "content" structure of TORI management theory is some variation or corollary of the four fundamental propositions:

T: Personal behavior produces trust; role or depersonalized behavior produces defense.

O: Authentic openness produces integration of living process; covert strategy produces counter-strategy and circumvention.

R: Internal realization results in high productivity; persuasion produces resistance and disintegration.

I: Interdependence produces synergy; control produces dependency/rebellion.

Put another way, "managing people" means to relate in some enhancing, non-constraining way to the following processes:

T: Inner trust, emotionality, acceptance, inclusion, membership, growth of selfhood and being.

O: Open communication, flow of "hard" data and data about perceptions and feelings, input and output.

R: Realizing of potential, goal formation, productivity, work, creativity, performance, motivation, problem solving.

I: Interdependence, control, organization, structure, flow, form, relationships, interbeing.

The teacher or administrator who is relatively trusting is likely to "manage" emotionality, communication, goal formation, and organizing by being more personal, open, allowing, and interdepending. The manager who is relatively less trusting will be more depersonalizing, strategic and closed, persuasive, and controlling.

One way to apply TORI theory is for a parent or manager to conduct a continuing series of mini-experiments with life—being as personal, open, allowing, or interdepending as he or she is able to be in the immediate situation, granting his or her fear level (perceived risk).

Life, for the TORI-oriented manager, is a continuing discovery, a learning process, an experimentation, an experience with trust formation. A primary criterion of managed-system effectiveness is: Are managers learning from what they are doing?

All management problems can be classified under one of the four processes listed above. The technical aspects of relating to such problems as materials acquisition, floor space, manufacturing, distribution, and finance are important technical issues. But the critical and overriding management issues concern how managers relate to the people who in turn relate to these technical problems. The key question is: How do managers relate to emotionality (T), communication (O), motivation (R), and interdependence (I)?

The EQ level in churches, homes, businesses, schools, and agencies is, with few exceptions, in the EQ II, III, and IV range. The manager's job, it seems to me, requires him to function at a higher level—to provide some kind of answer to the question: How can I learn to live in some fulfilling way in the environment/institution I'm in? Another concurrent question is: How can I join with others collaboratively to change this environment? It is important to me to live, at peace with myself, in the world I am in. If I can learn to relate to the world I'm in with authenticity, in a personal, open, allowing, and interdepending way, then I and the world will change.

If I want to use TORI theory in a diagnostic and reflective way in looking at my organization and my task, I must look at the fears and the distrusts in the system and how they express themselves and at the trust in the system and how it is expressed. For instance, a frequent pattern in our contemporary culture is a bi-modal distribution of attitudes about environmental quality. There is a vigorous and vocal majority of people who believe in EQ II and III levels as a model of management. They believe in a clear, direct, and responsible authoritarianism as the most efficient, realistic, and attainable pattern of life. This autocratic group believes in a muted and reasonable use of power, with the most expert, qualified, skilled, and intelligent citizenry serving as leaders—a balance wheel against the vagaries and instabilities of societal events.

Another group, clearly a minority, believe in EQ V and VI levels as a model of enlightened management. They believe that people have the capacities and skills necessary to make their own decisions, to create their own lives, to make responsible choices, to engage in productive and creative work, and to join with each other to create, together, their schools, homes, businesses, and churches.

Both of these groups are highly diverse and these two statements are greatly oversimplified. But the statements represent a significant issue of our time: How do institutions that are essentially autocratic and benevolent move toward participative and emergent environments?

The following two tables present a schematic analysis of these two bi-modal environments. Table XVII presents an analysis of the autocratic and benevolent styles of environment, their predominantly defensive character structure, and the effects of these styles upon the system and the people in the system. Roles are structured, delineated, and prescribed, and result in the draining of energy into defense, the creation of a general atmosphere of paranoia and various forms of protective collusion. Masking and covert strategies are programmed into the system, resulting in secrecy, energy drained away from productive activity into counter-strategy and circumvention, and great difficulties in using any kind of decision-making process other than issuing directives from the top. Motivations are managed by manipulating extrinsic reward systems, which results in multiple forms of resistance to doing productive and creative work. Processes are controlled by rules, laws, and power, resulting in a wide variety of forms of dependence and counter-dependence.

Table XVIII presents analysis of participative and emergent environments, which allow for the rise of the discovering processes in such a way that the primary tone of the organization or group is non-defensive. Personal behavior leads to trusting and caring. Open, disclosing behavior leads to integration of emotionality into work rather than into circumventive strategies. Allowing behavior results in personal and system goal integration of intrinsic motivations. Interdepending behavior leads to emerging patterns of synergy and cooperation.

EQ level IV, which is advisory in nature, is a relatively neutral transitional stage between these two opposing poles in our culture. The expansion of the data base and the bridging between management and labor mute the reactive and defensive processes stirred up by authoritarian practices and lay the groundwork for later stages of participation and authentic collaboration. "Scientific" management is a way station between autocracy and creative emergence.

As stated in Chapter III, the EQ scale is a description of personal growth, as well as of organizational growth. It is my observation that most persons and institutions have a functional span of about three EQ levels. There is a level that we have largely moved away from, one that is the primary mode of the present, and a third that seems plausible, possible, and attainable in a reasonable length of time.

There is also a significant experiential range: a range of environmental alternatives which a person, a group, or an organization has experienced in depth so that decisions and images are reality-oriented, communicable, and clear. For instance, many persons have never really experienced groups of any size in which leaders did not provide the major source of energy and organization, and so in their minds EQ levels VI through X exist only in some vague conceptual realm and are not really viable options or action images. On the other hand, some modern children raised in progressive homes and schools may never have experienced an EQ level I or II environment and know about them only through reading or hearsay. Many students of management see as viable alternatives only the four EQ levels II through V, roughly paralleling the familiar Likert Systems I, II, III, and IV management styles. For many people, talk about EQ levels IX and X, about transcendent and cosmic phenomena, is unfamiliar, threatening, or too much like science fiction to take seriously as living options for today's world.

It is important for any person who attempts to apply Trust-Level theory to get in touch with his or her own developmental level, preferred mode of interacting, fears and anxieties about certain levels, experiential gaps, range of clear images, and value systems. I am assuming that each of us can do this with some useful degree of accuracy. While to some degree one can choose a management style, it is my observation that each person lives best in an environment style, it is my observation that each person lives best in an environment that is relatively congruent with his or her own values, modal behavior, attitudes, customary habits, and deep-lying proclivities.

I believe that there is a natural growth of persons and institutions along the EQ scale. Defense level is correlated with EQ level in an inverse way. The more we reduce our defenses, the more we and our culture move up the EQ scale. When we and our organizations learn to understand and accept who we are or what they are, defenses are reduced, and feelings of trust move the system on the scale. For example, when autocracy becomes a way of life and people are more trusting of it, there is a natural tendency to become compassionate and benevolent. When, at the organic EQ level, empathic and intuitive modes of living become familiar and integrated into life, there is a natural tendency for integration to occur at other levels and for the inner wellsprings of quasi-conscious energy and creativity to become incorporated into living.

One aspect of this process is consciousness raising. As people become aware of new EQ levels, of new freedoms, of new potential, or new trends, there is a tendency to grow and to realize or actualize inner images.

Clear and vivid imagery of a new EQ level is a potent step in its attainment.

Growth is an inner-outer process. Effective persons and organizations are centered. Directions, motives, movement, feelings—all come from the center of the being of the person, of the group, or of the organization; they then move to the outer edges, and then on to external relations.

The manager who contributes to the myth that he or she "manages" the system, sets its goals, makes its decisions, or creates its process, is creating trouble. Being, data flow, goal formation, and interdependence, the four TORI variables, are system variables, emerge from the innards, and are needs of the system itself. The sensitive manager (like any other effective system member) senses what people want, diagnoses the emerging goals, sees the process that is developing, and then contributes to the process as best he or she can. This process of management creates strong, dynamic organizations that are inner-directed, and it creates persons who are centered and interdependent.

Effective managers, ministers, therapists, teachers, and parents are continually in the process of working themselves out of a job. They live and work in ways that strengthen the system itself; they increase the visibility of interdependencies, and in the process they become less essential to the organization or the family. Inexperienced, insecure, or defensive managers or parents do not recognize this process and often act in ways to make themselves indispensable. In fact, new managers often try to do something managerial to justify their additional salary and status.

A fundamental error of the manager, parent, or person in role is to get tied up in the control system. The attempt to control another person sets up counterforces that are detrimental to the system. Managers can help to set up processes that control other processes. One can control the flow of goods, the processing of data, and the use of space; but persons and systems are healthier if it is the aims, conditions, data, or the other needs of the system that control people.

There are many ways of exerting control or attempting to. These may be conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional. A parent or teacher who expresses an opinion, makes a suggestion, or utters an offhand remark may be creating a relationship that exerts a subtle control over the child or student.

Defensiveness is the countervailing dynamic of trust level. Any manager can increase the effectiveness of the system by doing whatever is possible to remove forces that increase defensiveness. Among the frequent factors that increase defensiveness, and the concomitant, counter-productive defending process of role-in", closing, oughting, and controlling are:

1. Fears of all kinds. These are the generic force of the defense systems. "Managerial behavior" produces fears of disapproval, evaluation, depersonalization, failure, inadequacy, and a whole host of feelings associated with the fear of father figures.
2. Pressure and tension. Inexperienced and fearful managers may deliberately increase pressures on the false but prevalent assumption that increasing the inducing forces on people will increase motivation. Management at all levels applies pressure from above to increase fear/ tension/activity below.
3. Competition. An atmosphere of competition results in continuous attack on the perceived adequacy of people, and the resulting need to defend.
4. Evaluation. Children, students, workers, members of the congregation, and patients, all respond with defense when they see themselves being evaluated now or threatened with evaluation in the future. Whatever positive effects may come from the threat of evaluation, they are surely counter-balanced by the negative effects of the defensive behaviors produced.
5. Strategy. People who feel themselves in the ambiguity of an atmosphere filled with strategy, especially covert strategy, are continually focused on counter-strategy. The defense-oriented energy spent on devising strategies and counter-strategies is probably the single most powerful contribution to lowered productivity in tightly-managed operations.
6. Physical danger. Imaginary or perceived physical dangers contribute to defensiveness. Children who have been punished are particularly susceptible to physical threats. Defensive managerial postures are especially aroused (and rationalized) when there are poisons in the hospital or home cabinets, violent prisoners in the yard, deep waters near the summer camp, dangerous machinery in the plant.

When defense levels are aroused, managers regress to lower EQ levels. When fear and defense are mild, regression goes back one or two levels. The higher the fear and defense, the further down the scale the person goes. If fear is high enough, almost anyone, whatever his or her theory, will go back to power and/or punishment.

Regression is particularly prevalent when the theory is not well internalized and embedded in the being and habits of the manager. The frightened mother who feels insecure about her child-rearing practices is easily aroused to spank or lash out. The threatened supervisor whose theory is inadequate for most emergencies will resort to punishment when pushed.

Regression is reduced when the environmental quality is well integrated into articulated theory, well-established assumptions, congruent values, emotional support, and clear choices.

Many managers, ministers, parents, and administrators see themselves caught in the middle of a set of conflicting pressures and forces. Expectations are strong and conflicting: the expectations of bosses, boards, subordinates, neighbors, customers, the congregation. Books on management, child rearing, church education, and administration proliferate and conflict with each other. It is almost literally true that if a parent or manager decides upon a clear course of action, he or she can find an authoritative book with a theory to rationalize the action.

Even if I as a manager wish to do so, it is impossible to meet all the conflicting demands of parents, relatives, superiors, boards, workers, or others who may have legitimate, or see themselves as having legitimate demands on me.

A working solution that seems to be successful for many TORI practitioners in resolving these dilemmas is to follow some such sequence as the following:

1. As the manager or parent or minister I start by looking into myself, creating my own theory and learning what EQ level is comfortable for me in my surroundings, where I live and work. I take care of me and my emotional and psychological needs, discovering what relationships are most fulfilling for me with my family, team, or congregation.
2. I make determined efforts to create a climate of trust and freedom in my family, group, or team. It is important to share our fears and trusts openly with each other, to tell each other what we want for ourselves and for the group, to be as personal with each other as our fears permit, and to explore the ways in which we want to be interdependent. As the leader, I may be seen by the family or the team as having some kinds of responsibilities above and beyond those of other team or family members. It is best to deal openly with this issue and to create a solution agreeable to the members and to authorities that interface with me. Intra-team and intra-family relationships are usually considerably easier to work through than interface issues. If the division head insists that I, as the responsible manager, am responsible for failure of my management team to meet a production deadline, my team and I have an issue to work through with each other and with the division head. If the school authorities decide that I, as a parent, am responsible for seeing that my children go to school regularly, and on time, my family and I have an issue to work on with each other and with the school authorities.
3. The TORI parent or manager who has worked through a theory in some manner approximating the processes listed in Table X will have little trouble with these first two steps in building a theory and creating a compatible and trusting work group or family group. The process is exciting and stimulating.
4. Any face-to-face group or family can achieve whatever EQ level the group can clearly form into a concrete image that the group wants to achieve. I am not saying that there will be no problems. There will likely be anger, differences, conflict, rivalry, jealousy, resentment, and frequent negative and disturbing feelings. There will also be love, support, understanding, empathy, encouragement, joy, and many positive and encouraging feelings. The processes of discovering each other, of fighting and coming into conflict, of loving and caring, of celebrating and transcending differences, of creating trust—these are the real fabric of living and being. This is at the center of the family, the church, the business, or the school: trusting the magic of the discovering processes.
5. As I am creating my own theory and sharing in the building of the team or family, I make an effort to relate to the organization and community in a trust-building way. The key is to keep my courage and my vision—to keep my faith. A high-trust family or a high-trust team is a support environment for all its members, including the parents and the team manager. The intimacy and closeness that come with interaction-in-trust increase the trust among team members. This trusting environment often contrasts with the seemingly distant and impersonal environment of the surrounding organization or neighborhood. Upper management, other teams, and the family neighborhood members may not understand our motives, our life style, or our daily rhythms as well as we do. Our team or family is sure to be more TORI-like, more close, more personal, and more free than the surrounding organization and neighborhood.
6. It is my observation that the interface between a TORI team or family and the surrounding environment will be supportive and positive if the team or family members are authentically personal, open, want-determined, and interdependent in relating to the surrounding environment. All members of the team relate to other members of the organization and can contribute to the overall climate of trust. The manager or parent is more likely to have critical interfaces with significant others, particularly in an authority-oriented climate. I know no magic formulae, but I have observed that most TORI-like managers and parents have a trust of others that makes it possible to relate to the outside world in a trust-escalating way.
7. While fulfilling whatever functions are required by the organization, the government, and the public, I do whatever I can to join the team or the family as a member and full person and enter into all the tasks, functions, and activities that define the group and the task. This process is not an abdication. It is not passive, non-directive, or confined in any way, but is an active joining and sharing.
8. In the discussion of management and role in the various chapters in this book I have taken a strong position on leaderlessness and emergence. As managers, ministers, administrators, parents, and therapists, we are useful only as we are needed by dependent people who are not fulfilling their potential as free, proactive, whole, and organic beings. We will no longer be needed by people who recognize that they don't need us. It is useful and necessary for us to hasten this process of consciousness raising, for a function of the therapist, parent, and leader is to reduce dependency. As we make the rapid transition into an emergent culture and as the team or family grows into new EQ levels, the role of manager, parent, minister, or administrator will gradually disappear. During the transition the persons in these roles can be aware of this process and be a significant force in the evolution of society toward an emergent life.

In our upward-mobile culture, people who want to advance often seek to move away from doing and move into managing others who do. An opposite trend—by those who are returning to the soil, to nature, and to crafts—is motivated by a recognition of the joys of "work", defined in a very broad sense.

The motives that lead one to become a manager, therapist, minister, helper, administrator, teacher, or executive, come to some degree from the following cluster: desire for prestige, power, money, control, influence, status, and avoidance of the mentality of "work". Our analysis shows that these motivations are clearly associated with lower EQ levels. They are in fact illusory, of little enduring satisfaction to actualized people, and they disappear as people grow into higher states of growth and environmental quality. These motivations are not associated with high environmental-quality levels.

People assume these roles for many other reasons: excitement, creativity, a wish to make contributions to society, and a desire to help people, among others; but persons can learn to satisfy these motivations in non-role ways as the society changes.

As we create a more holistic society there will be less need for people to work on the basis of motivations that are essentially defensive in character. People who want power, control, influence, and status usually want these states as a defense against fears of being impotent, insignificant, inferior, or under the arbitrary control of others. It is my observation that these power/control/status drives diminish or disappear when people move into holistic or transcendental states, as people lose the defensiveness that supports and feeds these drives.

When people get in touch with deep intrinsic motivations to do, create, be, discover, experience, transcend, give, commune, feel, they are able to create a personal and occupational life filled with these self-created and self-discovered wants and satisfactions. Consequences follow:

1. Such people find satisfaction on the job, create few problems for the organization, and do not need others to manage or lead them or give them therapy. Their own processes are healthy and life-giving.
2. Full involvement in this kind of life makes it possible for such people to reach holistic and transcendent states without the artificial aids of techniques or special methods. They create their own transcendence.

Defensive management in the early EQ levels is buttressed by a set of assumptions that change as managers develop more trust of the people they manage. The more defensive the parent, teacher, manager, minister, or administrator, the more likely is he or she to make some of these assumptions:

1. Deep down, most people don't really know what is best for them.
2. Most people don't really know what they want to do and need skilled help in such determination.
3. If most people are left alone, without expert help, their lives will be disorganized, immoral, have little creativity or productivity, and be of mediocre quality.
4. Those with higher motivations, a larger perspective, greater skills, and more intelligence must take leadership in bettering society, in running a mill, in setting a moral example, or in setting adequate goals.
5. People need training in communication and if left alone without adequate and skilled help, are likely to express themselves poorly, listen inattentively, and create difficulties for themselves.
6. The majority of people are not highly motivated and, if not supervised properly or given inspiration by expert leaders, will be rather lazy, do relatively shoddy work, and seek the easiest and least challenging tasks.
7. Most people show little interest in real learning and need skilled help in developing learning interests, required skills, goal-setting experience, and appropriate habits of study.

These assumptions are self-fulfilling. The more firmly the manager believes them, the more likely is he or she to act in ways that prove them to be true. Many parents, teachers, and managers act in these ways toward children, students, and workers. Perhaps more significant is the fact that many children, students, and workers make these same assumptions about themselves and about the others around them.

I believe that these assumptions are not true. The world, in my experience, is more like the following:

1. Deep down, most people know what is good for them. In fact, each person is the best judge of himself or herself and is the best expert on his or her own life. People, in an environment of trust, discover this.
2. Most people really do know what they want to do. Many times, through fear and distrust, people do not express what they want. These same fears and lack of trust keep them from doing what they want to do.
3. When "left alone" and when given full responsibility for themselves, most people are highly goal-directed, ethical, creative, and productive. This has been demonstrated over and over in experimental programs with groups that were thought by many to be the least likely to take such responsibility: prisoners, mental patients, juvenile delinquents, and others with poor track records in life. What is required is a group of persons with enough courage (trust) to give each other full, unqualified, trust. So many parents, teachers, and managers give a kind of probationary and contingent trust, which is only a pseudo-trust and is recognized as such. Contingent trust is often frightening and difficult to deal with.
4. Most people are competent, skilled, intelligent, and motivated enough to provide their own leadership, initiate their own actions, build their own morals, and run their own lives.
5. Most people know how to communicate very well. Many times they allow themselves to be immobilized by fear and distrust and shut themselves off from expressing themselves or from listening to others.
6. Most people enjoy self-chosen work and in fact will choose the most challenging and significant work available. What's more, they will do it very well, for they like to do well. They accept challenge, tackle worthy tasks, and perform with quality. This reality is often covered up in the defensive climates that one can find in many homes, schools, and factories. "Work" that is not worth doing is not worth doing well, as Maslow put it. Work that is arbitrarily assigned, meaningless, irrelevant, unrelated to inner goals, or given punitively is resisted by most people. Students, children, and workers who do such work with understandably low motivation are then seen as lazy or incompetent, as "poor students" or "poor workers".
7. Most people are curious and experimental. They enjoy learning new things and have wide interests, setting "real" goals rather than artificial ones and studying avidly when they move into autogenic learning processes—when they are in charge of their own learning.

Such assumptions are woven into the fabric of our theories about people and life. Each person has a complex inter-weaving of attitudes, feelings, perceptions, assumptions, beliefs, and habits that we have called his or her "theory" of living. This theory and these embedded assumptions grow and change with experience. They are highly related to the EQ level. People live in, create, and are nurtured by the EQ level that is most suited to their current inner nature. This inner nature and theory of living both grow and change with experience. Both the inner nature and the theory can be changed by the person. How this change occurs is a major issue of this book. The learning theory calls for new directions in management development for teachers, parents, and other managers of the processes of living.

One's theory of management growing emerges from the EQ level of one's life. To oversimplify:

In a punitive environment, people would be subtly punished for having the "wrong" assumptions about people, and behavior modification programs would be set up to change the assumptions or to attempt to do so. In a purely autocratic environment, people would be instructed to manage differently, given the correct assumptions, or told how to set up situations that would produce new assumptions.

In a benevolent environment, new managers might be given differential warmth and approval for having the correct assumptions and behavior, be carefully protected from incorrect experiences, and be helped to learn new assumptions. In EQ level IV, the training program might be highly rational and persuasive, with information and new data given as the base of the training program. People would be taught new assumptions.

A participative program might include a learning community in which new or potential managers would work together to create learning experiences, set common learning goals, and attempt to discover their own theories and assumptions.

In EQ levels VI through X there would be no need for a formal training program for new and potential leaders. The need for managers, teachers, and "parenting" parents would gradually disappear. People would know how to create new experiences and new states of being and would go about doing so. The environment itself would be the medium for learning and development.